Joe Carter:
The Story: “It used to be called illegitimacy,” says the New York Times. “Now it is the new normal.” Once largely limited to poor women and minorities, motherhood without marriage has settled deeply into middle America: More than half of births to American women under 30 occur outside marriage.
The Background: In 1965, Daniel Patrick Moynihan, then a top Labor Department official and later a U.S. senator from New York, warned of a “tangle of pathology” that was resulting from the number of black children—25 percent—that were being born out of wedlock. Today, 73 percent of black children, 53 percent of Latinos and 29 percent of whites, are born outside marriage.
